Beef No. 2 – Martial Therapists are not umpires.  Their job is not to hear each person’s complaints and to decide which one is more right than the other.  It is this belief that both clients and some couples counselors embrace that makes couples therapy the least successful therapy with the highest failure rate.  However, those trained in a specific approach to couples therapy (of which there are a handful), are remarkably more successful.  Clients enter couples counseling with both a great certainty and a great fear.  The certainty is that the problems the couple are experiencing are mostly because of their partner.  The fear is that they, themselves, will be blamed.  Blame and shame – these are the boulders on the shoulders of the individuals commencing couples therapy.  Any therapist who tries to impart to each person, “If you do a little more of this or a little less of that you will improve your relationship,” will ultimately do more harm than good.   What a shame that therapists (mostly trained in individual therapy – and often quite good at individual therapy) create an environment of blame and defensiveness that will usually result in one person feeling more identified as a problem, unheard, shamed and definitely unsafe.  This doesn’t have to be, but couples therapists have to avoid becoming overly engaged in the tangle of content.